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Ghost Recon:Wildlands opened a new chapter in the games long running history and a turn to openworld that seems to be the trend with new iterations of old franchises. Advanced Warfighter IMO was one of the stand out games for this franchise and I was looking forward to this announcement and have been playing this solidly for some time. Figured it was time to throw in my two pence [ED: doesn’t work in a british connotation].

This game was originally clouded in issues of a political nature as the people of Bolivia did not take kindly to being tarred with a brush of drug cartels and conflict. Something I find slightly skewed, video games in their entirety are an extension of fantasy and should be taken as such. Looking above this contreversy the game it self is solid. Set in a sprawling map that has more than enough to do and a story that ticks along at a good pace. The Story is an interesting premise as you work as a goverment operative part of the Ghost team who do not exist in a true sense to anyone, and are helping bring down the drug cartel in control through out Bolivia. The story missions take your through a journey of taking out various low/mid/high level bosses to unlock the chance to take out the main man.

The gunplay and movement is perfectly Ghost Recon and feel very intuitive, you have a vast array of guns and gadgets to assist in your missions and these can be heavily modified to whatever the mission may ask of you. In typical ‘Dave’ fashion I tend to go down the route of assault rifle primary [silenced of course don’t want anyone knowing im coming or going for that matter] secondary – Sniper. My preferences aside you really do have smorgasbord of weaponry at your disposal. To unlock weapons you need to find weapon caches across the map and these can be located either by stumbling upon them or completeing side missions and finding vantage points that unlock the map as you go [weapon accessories are found in the same way]. You have different attributes to upgrade as you go and these are unlocked by finding different supplies across the map and again by completeing side quests that give you access to reinforcements, vehicle spawns etc which gets gradually more hardcore as you unlock them. This is a good thing and a bad thing as once you have completed a majority of side missions I find the ability to spawn a helicopter at your will slightly overadvantageous. You can fast travel once certain points are unlocked in the map which makes the game feel far more fluid than travelling for 15 minutes at a time.

4 player Co-Op is what makes me love this game further. I now have very limited time to play games and find I will only jump on when friends or family have the time too and the 4 player coop done correctly feels incredibly reqrding and fun. [sticking C4 to a car that your friends have jumped into and then detonating as you jump out is still funny] the difficulty level increases dependant on the the number of players which gives a fantastic difficulty curve and the addition of stealth missions means all guns blazing is not always the go to tactic.

The game as casual gamer is ok. I say this as you do have to travel sometimes that can eat into your limited game time. There has been a number of expansions released recently that will add new missions and story arcs and currently there is talk of open world PvP multiplayer which would be a welcome addition to an already rock solid game. The longevity of this is yet to be seen as with the expansions you do get a very similar experience with the addition of new vehicles and guns, this keeps it fresh but will stale quickly [ED: like a jaffa cake on the kitchen counter]

The biggest hurdle a lot of games sat in the open world genre face is immersing someone in the enviroment enough to throw to one side the fact you have to travel and you have to travel then some to get to objectives / waypoints. This is overcome by a wide variety of vehicles and transport to get you to where you need to go and some are far more satisfying than others. The ability to spawn these vehicles does grind my gears a bit but needs must I guess. I’d recommend this game for all third person fans of true military shooters and anyone who enjoys the strategic Ghost Recon games to put it bluntly – It’s a serious Just Cause 3!

You know where the comments are so go have a rant or give us your two pence 🙂